INDIO >> Coachella kicked off the first of its two weekends on Friday with a breezy but not too warm day, all manner of beautiful people, the usual wild and colorful art installations and music, glorious music, practically every genre under the bright desert sun.

LCD Soundsystem made a triumphant return to Coachella more than five years after founder James Murphy disbanded the beloved dance-rock collective.

The band drew tens of thousands of fans to the main stage for its headlining spot in Friday, playing the best of its catalog of songs – “Daft Punk Is Playing In My House” is one that showed up early in the set.

LCD Soundsystem remains that unique act in dance music that can make the body move – it’s grooves are relentless – while engaging the head, too, with lyrics that range from hopeful to melancholy to the humorous.

Before Jack U, though, Sufjan Stevens turned in the set of the day, a colorfully bonkers performance that found the sensitive songwriter discarding the sadness for joyful dances and neon costumes throughout his band.

Stevens’ set had hardly begun before the angel-wing wearing singer smash his banjo on the stage. He wrapped up a completely satisfying 50 minutes later running around the stage covered in balloons. It was a wonder, and wonderful.

Like your indie rock melodic and twee. Iceland’s Of Monsters and Men fit your bill as twilight descended, in the mood for something hard and raw. The Kills turned in a typically incendiary set on the Coachella stage around the same time.

Highlights during the first day of the festival included the eye-and-ear-opening vocals of the young R&B singer Gallant who wowed the crowd in the Mojave tent with his pure tone and stratospheric falsetto. He wrapped up with one of the first surprise guest turns of the festival when Seal arrived on stage to first duet on Seal’s hit “Crazy” and then on their recent collaboration “Weight in Gold.”

Next door about the same time the French electronic rock act Christine and the Queens delivered one of the standout sets of the day. Singer Héloïse Letissier performs as the character Christine, singing in French and English. Her band includes four contemporary dancers with whom she performs in choreographed numbers. Good bet that not a lot in the Gobi tent knew all that much about her at the outset, but all certainly left impressed by her fierce and charismatic artistry.

Other late afternoon performances included the hard atmospheric rock of the British band Foals, a favorite of KROQ programmers, and a moody yet danceable turn by the group Bob Moses, one of KCRW’s stalwarts.

Throughout the mid-afternoon the crowds slowly filtered into the festivals grounds. Rapper Joey Bada$$ had a decent-sized crowd for his main stage set and electronic wizard Robert DeLong, who somehow manages to play three different drum sets and a keyboard station all on his own, got his Coachella stage audience dancing to his beats and squiggles of synthetic sounds.

Miami Horror, an Australian electronic rock band, made a strong connection with its Mojave tent fans, most of whom were up and dancing throughout the set as the snappily dressed Aussies played danceable rock and roll for a nearly full house.

Staples played a mix of classics from the Staples Singers catalogue – “I’ll Take You There” and “Freedom Highway” among them – as well as the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People,” a highlight of her set, and the Ben Harper-penned “Love and Trust.”

Her voice was a little scratchy at times – she joked she was at “Choke-a-Chella” after one wind-and-dust-induced coughing fit – but her soulful growl and gospel vocals and testifying were highlight of the early afternoon.

The earliest sets on Friday got the newest acts, and often youngest performers in the lineup, including Haelos, whose electronic and atmospheric rock set a lovely mood for those who arrived in the Mojave tent early enough to catch their Coachella debut.

Frances, a 22-year-old English singer, played pretty piano ballads to a small crowd early in the day in the Gobi tent and admitted that she was even a bit surprised to find anyone there for her.

“I’m such a Brit abroad,” she said at one point. “I’m so white you can see me from the moon. I really thought I’d be playing to one person.”

Nineteen-year-old Låpsley who sings in the same retro soul and R&B style of fellow Brits such as Adele and the late Amy Winehouse, if not to their level yet, seemed similarly impressed to have made the journey from her home near Liverpool to Coachella.

“Thank you all, I’ll be seeing all in the beer garden,” she said at the finish. “I got a fake ID!”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

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